From what I can tell, it seems that the faster we go, the less we seem to actually do: relatively.

Or to be more precise, the more our doing becomes about the speed at which we do it, the less it becomes about the thing we’re doing.

It seems that in pursuit of speeding up the process of doing something we transform it. The relentless acceleration of the task pushes it to a tipping point where ultimately, thereafter, that task becomes secondary to the process or system by which we accelerate it and the accelerant we use to do so.

We stop doing something faster.

Going faster becomes what we do.

“What are you doing?”

“No idea! But Christ I’m doing it super hyper fast. AND I’m connected to a squillion people so not only am I doing it faster – I am sharing it faster. I am not only a speeding bullet but also a skin-searing wildfire. I’m going like awesome shit-off-a-tech-shovel, me.”

I’d always hoped that there was a simple equal and opposite (satanic Newtonian shyster that I am) to the hyper accelerating self.

For some time I’d put my money on the ‘car-crash slo-mo’ of our primal sensory faculty, which, when engaged by danger or crisis, helps us maintain some semblance of equilibrium and control in that moment by slowing everything down to enable us to comprehend and avoid the particular parts of it that may well, well, be the death of us.

But my monkey/pigeon/lizard brain’s ability to shutter down the speed of any one hyper-fast occurrence, thereby allowing me to scrutinise every infinitesimal piece of detail and information and subsequently better navigate and ride its turbulence doesn’t lead me to avoiding the worst of its consequences. It simply leads me to developing a greater ability to absorb utterly meaningless stuff at speed through the porous edges of the moment.

So that’s not helping me.

The other thing that might have been well-placed to put some brakes on the worst vestiges of my hyper accelerated self would have been Mindfulness.

But Nope. Not doing it for me either. I mean, I get it. To learn and properly understand what it means to live in the Now. To remove the distractions of past and future, to truly concentrate on the moment you are in, appreciate it, bathe in it, turn it over in one’s palm like a polished stone: a remarkable ability.

My only concern is that the Now, devoid of past or future – experience and potential, memory or dream, and all of the information both emotional and rational that comes with them – seems incomplete to me.

Mindfulness seems to do the very opposite for me of what it should do. I kick out any traces to allow me to super-focus on the moment – a form of hyper-vigilance of the Now – but I end up with a load of random other stuff pouring into the spaces left behind – spaces I’d rather fill with the past and future brackets that should encase each experience.

So, what else?

A shift in context and environment perhaps? Well, again, yes, to an certain extent.

Having moved from London to Lewes has compelled me to exist at a pleasantly slower pace of life some of the time.

(At which juncture I’d like to thank Southern Rail profusely for their concerted and sustained efforts in disavowing me of the idea that I live on a highly efficient arterial rail line into and out of the breath-taking speed of the metropolis.)

But like mindfulness, for all of one’s best endeavours, the slower Now of Lewes is forever bracketed by what has gone before (chasing the dollar in London) and what follows (chasing the said same dollar). So solely relying on context and environment alone are not the answer.

And in our relentlessly connected world one can never really escape the accelerant of prosperity.

Even in sleepier Lewes, the long shadow of thriving, or what constitutes the current shiny, slebby ‘got stuff’ model of it, seeps into everything.

Lewes has a great mixture of types: it’s not all DownFromLondons like me.

You have the My F@*%ng Red Trousers of the hollowed-out East Sussex Hooray and their crisply Lavender-ironed wife – the ex-Brighton burn-out, sporting a dog on a string and blue dip-dyed hair shaved on one side clutching a gig flyer – the blue-cloud green-horizon landscape of artsy-craftsy Sussex potter/painter/candlestick and scatter cushion maker – the vintage Linen Interior of the LifeStyle shop owner– the white Sussex Van Man & Scaffolder Bloke, bastion of BREXIT, with a vocal dislike of anything or anyone foreign or exotic; apart from the ‘Chinky’ Chinese and that ‘Itie’ Pizza Place of course.

(Their cultural myopia seems to simply melt away like a wood fired Quattro Formaggi amidst the scrolling menu of Just Eat and Deliverooo. Note to Self: Deliveroo as the Open University of Multi-Culturalism – a distribution platform for culturally enlightening and Pro Remain data and facts to Little England).

And there’s plenty of the Hunt Supporter tractor-chic squad here to fill the spaces between the stripped oak floorboards of Lewes society.

And then of course we have that herd of shining individuals, floating above the ground, thrusting towards Waitrose in their hovercrafts of enrichment.

The gleaming lines of Range Rovers and Landrovers (and every other over specified, under-utilised 4X4 you care to mention) with their wholly unused Hi Lo gear ratios (the cockyx of the car world – a left-over from the cars once utlitarian past – not dissimilar to the vestige of a tail that we carry behind us) whooshing up and down the high street – are busy as they are in the furious industry of Doing Well.

(Hands up who leases their 4×4? I rest my case.)

There is no absence of the merry middle class dance here. All manner and strata of people parking up outside elaborately ordained pubs on weekends for overpriced Sunday Roasts and a scrum of collective thriving, cawing loudly of new this and expensively experienced that; of particular schools and exotic holidays – puffing up the brightly-coloured wings of their success, clutching menus like divining rods to the well of contentment hidden somewhere in front of them, just out of sight and reach.

They’re certainly not going to help me decompress from the consuming rush of 21st century existence.

In fact, with one’s ears too wide open and a thinner skin on, quite the opposite might happen here. Devoid as charming market towns are of the anonymity of the blurring vari-speed white waters of a city – everyone gets drawn even further into the accelerated need to succeed under the hot spotlight of local visibility.

BUT there is one group – a higher tribe – rendered by life experience and tenure rather than by culture creed profession or class – to whom homage pays dividends.

And they are the source of my new self-penned Sioux-like name – Walks Slowly With Old Folks.

For someone who walks far too quickly at the best of times (as to whether I am walking away from myself or towards someone or something more interesting I’ve not yet fathomed), slowing down to the walking speed of old people is a remarkable fillip to an accelerated or accelerating life.

Various things happen:

Sight – old people spend less time furiously concentrating on the aspect and angle of their trajectory though life – which means they have more time to be aware of what is immediately about them. They don’t suffer what I like to call Thrive Blindness (the loss of the ability to see what’s immediately in front and around us that comes from rushing towards the next ratchet of prosperity.) That’s a good thing.

Connection – old people are far more capable of engaging with those around them because they are not moving so fast that they ‘can’t stop’. Watching various professionally busy White Rabbits (always so terribly late for some important date) in grave danger of tripping over their own feet if they were for one moment expected to stop, turn and actually engage with another human other than those whom might improve their situation makes for little easing in the speed of life dept.

Smell – old people exist in an old world model of associated scent. Simply put, when you slow down your speed of passage through the world you actually smell the environment you are in or are travelling through. Sight and sound and smell and the emotions they generate are more likely to remain in tact, inextricably connected to each other as they should be. A rushed life leads to misappropriation of smells, constantly slung as they are to a newer or abstracted reference point, as opposed to the one just that actually created them.

Mortality – old people exist in far greater proximity to their own demise. They do not need the trending self help manual du jour to tell them that every moment is precious, especially those spent in pursuit of the things that make us truly happy. Relentlessly reminded as they are by the passing of their friends and peers and the shrinking of time in which that passing occurs, they don’t need help making the most of the Now. Its all they have left. The clarity that comes from being able to count the springs summers autumns and Christmases they have left in which to enjoy these things is a tainted gift.

The other observation is that there seems to be a better balance of sensibilities when Old people are present. They are an off-set strategy – renewables of humanity amidst the dirty coal of the industrious being of youth. Trees to the CO2 of an accelerating tech-fuelled life.

So it is my intention at every opportunity to Walk Slowly With Old Folks. Because even at their grumpiest, they prove that all of us eventually will shrug off this distemper of the projected, accelerated and visibly successful self, and replace it with something far more meaningful.

(The ‘hey! lets do something creative!’ version that is; as opposed to the Birth and Big Beard Versus Big Bang kind.)

It’s all the rage: like cocaine, Taylor Swift, snapchat and uprisings.

And taking some of the creative people I’ve come across in my own ‘creative’ career as an example, rage seems the most apposite of words for this tempestuous trend.

The creative endeavor as a civilized form of howling at multiple moons is all so ‘Now’, and a lot more populist and less ‘rare’ than it once was.

The infinite collision of technology, accessibility, social collectives, the relentless inspirations of the internet and the democratization of creating offered by the endless tools and networks populating our digital lives is shifting the social paradigm of creativity.

In many ways this is a wonderful thing: but it makes the ‘purist’ creative creature out there very nervous.

For the pure creative; someone who has probably invested an enormous amount of time and energy in developing their otherness this new ‘thin’ democratized creativity is a hellish confection.

To someone who has invested their whole being to all that zigging while others zagged, the ritual disemboweling of the inner Id: all those hours crawling through the primordial intellectual soup of abstraction and expression, little known philosophers, off beat gothic novels, performance art, turbulent emotional algorithms and the most impenetrable art shows, not to mention all that self harming, disorder development, and the habit of watching certain films just because they make other more ‘normal’ people nervous: imagine what horror at the idea of ‘’er next doors being craytive‘ too.

‘It’s just not right‘ they howl moonways: ‘it lacks, well, it lacks commitment’. Being ‘different’ – being of a creative persuasion is to be frank, exhausting, very particular and shouldn’t be for everyone. The democratization of creation: the auguring of an age of everyday creativity is sending shock waves through the existential halls of the mighty.

But don’t panic! If you are in the purist club, there’s always the madness and utter self destruction to fall back on.

The newly democratized creative people out there can get as fancy as they like with their 3D printing Maker movement sculptural maquettes; and their evolving algorithm art music BUT can they take an overdose?

Exactly.

For all of these new sweeping gestures towards ‘social creation’ the old model of what constitutes the white hot crucible of true creativity is still there: the final filter: and one studiously applied by those still inhabiting the rare academies of the creative mind and spirit.

You’ve always got the get out of jail card of being or becoming (certifiably if required) nuts – troubled with a capital T and an accompanying life-threatening addiction of some form or other.

‘Real’ creativity is conflicted.

‘Real’ creativity and the people who hawk it should exist in some hellish b-polar vortex, stumbling through quantum surges of creative doing wrapped in creative being.

‘Real’ creative types must be to a lesser or greater degree consumed by their art or creative nature, usually to some destructive degree.

Twas always thus.

It has indeed always been quite the fashion for the ‘Real’ creative person to be seen to enjoy an innate disposition for ‘explosive’ expression. This is romantic and poetic phrasing for what you or I might call losing it: getting shouty and throwing shit around.

Allowing their ‘passionate’ nature to overwhelm them and most everyone else within 5 emotional yards of them has always been quite vogue for the ‘tortured artist’ (though anyone who has read the conceptual treatise of any Art Installation works recently might say that it is the observer who is in fact being tortured, not the artist.)

Raging is and always has been quite the rage.

This rage it seems has two broad brush strokes.

Sometimes the rage is internal, turned inwards on the person; consuming themselves, their mind fracturing and splintering quietly in a room.

And at other times the rage is of that of the smashing, brutalizing murderous kind. One quick leaf through the stories of Caravaggio and Shakespeare’s contemporaries will find that the quick-tempered madness of the creator is at its sharpest in the act of destroyer – of lives, of chattles, of dreams, of stability, of innocence.

Even in the secondary (or some would say basement) of the creative world – the communications industry – this polarity, once celebrated, and now mostly disappeared, is still visible every now and then, stalking the corridors of the creative floor.

Sometimes the rage is a quiet cold cruel internal force compelling the sociopathic intellectual knife twister to ever-greater heights of creative depth; and much of the product, though very funny or terribly clever, can often seem to be utterly lacking in joy, even with 26 million youtube hits.

Other times, the rage takes the shape of a shambling, fog horn, noisy trousers, whoops where’s that wrap?-chat-chatty, self-conscious-shoe-wearing creative peacock (2 syllables – stress on the second syllable) crashing into their creativity like, well, like an overjoyed drunk into a shut door in Soho House. A krispy kreme variety box of joy with toffee sauce.

In the rarer and purer atmospheres, regardless of whether the form of creativity is being applied in the sciences, music, mathematics, literature & poetry, drama, engineering, product design or architecture, the polarities at work become even more marked, though only amongst a precious few.

Most of us pretenders scuff about somewhere in the space between these manic-depressive book-ends, floundering around for some premature pop of immortality played out for a very-mortal few days or weeks on a page or a screen – a pantone book of middlin’ shades of creative variation.

(Given 3D printing’s new role in illuminating the creative txt of our invention, the great news is that we can actually render these bookends in pure alabaster; one a polished relief depicting Andy Kaufmann and Steven Wright in a Same Sex Marriage; and the other played out in a bass relief of John Belushi and Jeff Koons Buddy-Jumping from a burning pink plane)

Though highly one-dimensional, as a first-meeting finger in the air Type A Type B approach to identifying creativity in the world, these bookends do a fair job.

Though flippantly rendered, these two types do point towards something of a deeper less facile creative truth.

Take it as a given: this law of polarity is at work in all realms of creative endeavor, their two schools, distinctive and immutable opposites in most every way, still finding time to integrate, interrelate and conflate, sometimes in the same theme, often in the same person.

These pillars of polarity represent the two furthest points of the inventive lateral compass, the divine hyper-tensile high-wire of creativity, strung tight and humming between them.

Standing atop these two pillars are two quite opposite schools of thought, nature and effect.

One is founded on the Scholarly pursuit of Knowing – a relentless curious incremental acquisitive reductive sparse sharpening intellectual inquisition in an ever-reducing space, theme or manner. A spirit level approach to creativity for a Jekyll-like persona.

The other collapses backwards into the Scholarly pursuit of UnKnowing – of breakage and unlearning, fracture, disruption, chaos, danger, bestial, unruly, anarchic – the smashed train-set approach to creativity far more suited to a Hyde-like approach to life.

Yes, there are myriad confections scattered between the two but, much in the same way as with the The Hunting Debate and the discussion of Benefits Cheats, we rarely hear the dulcet tones of those in the middle, trapped as they are between the deafening silence, atomic nature and cold eye of the Jekylls and the clanging-gong parachute silk pants and rocky horror debauch of the Hydes.

On the Knowing campus we find the likes of Andy Kaufmann, Gallileo, Ferran Adria, Robert Fripp, Seneca, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steven Hawking.

The Knowing are clearly defined in the world, set apart, celebrating their otherness through a celebration of the reductive forensic interrogation, construction and engineering of every piece of what it is they are in the process of creating. Their closed and in some ways highly scientific rational approach to the irrationality of creativity creates the dynamic tension in what they do.

The downside of the Knowing trajectory was beautifully bought to life in the first of the artist potter Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures – in which he reads out the conceptual treatise from some art work. An over complex, over blown piece of cod-intellectual arcana; like a dysfunctional Rubik’s cube of pompous phrases that could never align to anything resembling human meaning, whichever way you might try and spin them. A corrupted bastard child of the Knowing school.

On the UnKnowing Campus we have John Belushi, Caravaggio, John Nash, Oliver Reed, Diogenes, Byron, Iggy Pop, and Kurt Cobain

The UnKnowing’s ability to traverse the fractured, chaotic randomness of creative disorder, embrace the madness of invention and all that comes with it is an anathema to the average person. The UnKnowing’s capacity for clutching to the edges of life, merrily pumping the visceral, wheezing soul of the moment and of their own mortality is simply staggering. They also demonstrate an appetite for seeking redemption through destruction. In this paradox lies the dynamic tension of their tempestuous nature.

The vertiginous nose-bleed nature of their creative leaping and scrabbling up the stepping stones of madness in search of the creative ‘it’ is reminiscent of the snow leopard character, Tai Lung, in King Fu Panda.

In the scene where he escapes from the Chor-Gom prison, he does so by springing and scrambling up falling rocks, using them as descending elevators to rise back up out of the abyss: against all the laws of nature, his upward trajectory enabled by their downward one, the opposite of all that should be. That is the against-nature nature of the UnKnowing.

But often the most transcendent moment comes when we experience someone who makes the journey or transition from Knowing to UnKnowing or vice versa. Or when someone relentlessly and seamlessly shifts from one to the other.

At its simple journey level, Picasso is a good example of the shift from Knowing to UnKnowing. His skills as an accomplished artist in the traditional mold: his sense of scale and context, his draughts-manship, his painterly skills, brushwork, colourist’s eye and capture of the subject were exceptional. So when he chose to smash the vase of his traditional expertise, reassembling the fragments of what was in a new and abstracted disruptive way, he made the journey from Knowing to UnKnowing.

But in their extremes, especially that of the transcendent form, lies the greatest turbulence and far greater likelihood of a dark mortality.

So to be creative or not to be creative and in which sphere is not really the question. But whether we choose to be of the Knowing or the UnKnowing variety.

Perhaps, if you are creative yourself or know or work with creative people, the question that we should ask is this: am I, or they the Knowing or The UnKnowing kind: or the transcendent other?

Lets start there.

(And perhaps we should also spare a kind thought for those who find themselves imprisoned by these pillars, their only escape coming when the whole edifice collapses upon them.)